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'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot
stamping on a human face--for ever.' . . . . O'Brien went on: 'And
remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be
stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there,
so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again.'

O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown
stern again. 'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston,
however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray
is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural
term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to
you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you
down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen
to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything
will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or
friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or
integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we
shall fill you with ourselves.'

Some Extracts from George's Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four" / 1984

First line of 1984 (knowing this won the team a victory in a Pembroke, Ontario 2005 Quiz Night):

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,
more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters,
more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and
insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was
whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up
his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across
the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated
resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like
this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a
sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and
dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort
of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had
a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly
different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces,
bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes
insufficient--nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though,
of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this
was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness
of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty
soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil
tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind
of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

The first thing you have to understand is that in this place
there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious
persecution of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the
Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy,
and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at
the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that?
Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and
killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it
killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were
dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs.
Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the
shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the
twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were
called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian
Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more
cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined
that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they
knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before
they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately
set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them
down by torture and solitude until they were despicable,
cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their
mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and
sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
And yet after only a few years the same thing had
happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and
their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it?
In the first place, because the confessions that they had
made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not
make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are
uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all
we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must
stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.
Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean
out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas
and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain
of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living
brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the
future. You will never have existed.'

Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with
a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as
though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large
ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.

'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to
destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can
make the smallest difference in that case, why do we go
to the trouble ofinterrogating you first? That is what you
were thinking, was it not?'

'Yes,' said Winston.

O'Brien subiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern,
Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not
tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors
of the past? We are not content with negative obedience,
nor even with the most abject submission. When finally
you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We
do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he
resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we
capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and
all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not
in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him
one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us
that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the
world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the
instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old
days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic,
proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian
purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he
walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we
make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The
command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The
command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our
command is " Thou art". No one whom we bring to this
place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.
Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you
once believed-Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford - in the
end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation
myself I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering,
grovelling, weeping - and in the end it was not with pain
or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished
with them they were only the shells of men. There was
nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had
done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how
they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that
they could die while their minds were still clean.'

His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the
lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his Exce. He is not pretend-
ing, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes
every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He
watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in
and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all
ways larger than himself There was no idea that he had
ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago
known, examined and rejected. His mind contained
Winston's mind. But in that case how could it be true that
O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad.
O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had
grown stern again.

'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston,
however completely you surrender to us. No one who has
once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let
you live out the natural term of your life, still you would
never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to
the point from which there is no coming back. Things will
happen to you from which you could not recover, if you
lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of
ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside
you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship,
or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or
integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you
empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'

'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this.
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness
only power, pure power. What pure power means you
will understand presently. We are different from all the
oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing
All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were
cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the
Russian Communists came very close to us in their
methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their
own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed,
that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited
time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise
where human beings would be free and equal. We are not
like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the
intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an
end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order
to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is
persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of
power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer
crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he KNEW, that he was in the
right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there
must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been
exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he
had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as
he looked down at him.

'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong
point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are
mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But
that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a
digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we
have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.'
He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster
questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over
another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is
suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his
own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a
world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will
be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they
were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.
Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we are breaking down
the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We
have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and
between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend
any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from
a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual
formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.
Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except
loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over
a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When
we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be
no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity,
no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be
the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing
subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.'

He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to
shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything.
His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:

'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be
stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so
that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you
have undergone since you have been in our hands--all that will continue,
and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the
executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of
terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the
less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the
despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at
every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and
yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you
during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after
generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here
at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end
utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own
accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of
victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless
pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning,
I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you
will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become
part of it.'

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